Tag: restaurant

“What’s your favorite restaurant in Sydney?” is a question that I’m asked more often than you hear “Cracked pepper?” in a Cronulla cafe. Gun to my head, it’s probably a tiny Vietnamese shop, New Star, up the road with a few wobbly tables and not-bad pho. The staff are lovely, the spring rolls are hot, and it’s pretty much the perfect way to begin or end a week.

Except a “not-bad pho place” isn’t what anyone wants to hear, so I’ll usually say Ester or Palace Chinese, but the truth is I haven’t had an outright favorite restaurant since Don Peppino’s closed its doors in 2019 I’m a bit excited, then, that it’s back.

Well, back in swaggering spirit at least. Fontana opened last month in a first-floor Redfern site. Former Don Peppino’s chefs Daniel Johnston and Harry Levy are at the helm, with co-owner Ivey Wawn commanding the floor. It’s the hottest Italian joint to open since Surry Hills’ Pellegrino 2000 started making ravioli with wonton wrappers in February.

Don Peppino’s was a semi-permanent pop-up at the Grand Pacific Blue Room in Paddington, operating while developers worked out the most profitable way to redevelop the joint, as developers do. It felt like being at a university house party, complete with Tupac Shakur posters in the bathroom, but with much better wine and a smart, steady menu of Italian classics seasoned with postmodern panache.

The here-for-a-cracking-time-not-a-long-time approach meant that the Peppino’s team probably spent the same amount dolling up the former nightclub as Merivale’s Justin Hemmes spends on vintage fruit bowls at Totti’s. Fontana offers a similar party vibe, but with a decorating budget that might be closer to the cost of one of Totti’s tiled ovens. The new joint is here to stay and it’s already buzzing with big groups of 30-somethings.

A banquette best described as “dentist waiting-room beige” runs beneath street-facing windows. Walls are mostly Colgate white, punctuated with a lone succulent at one end of the room and an abstract oil-and-pastel by Chanel Tobler at the other. The space looks significantly more vibrant in daylight than at dinner, so Saturday lunch is the ticket – but when is it not?

Obviously, you’re going to order the mozzarella in carrozza ($6 each) to kick things off: outrageously crunchy, fried pillows of cheese and ‘nduja that come to the table demanding to be eaten with a negroni ($22) in the other hand . You’re probably going to want the artichoke alla guida ($14), too, that deep-fried dish of Rome’s Jewish community. It resembles a rust-coloured rose and you can have a terrific time plucking each golden artichoke leaf like a post-revolution French dandy: “She loves me, she loves me not – oh, to hell with it, who cares? This thing’s delicious Antoine, more lemon!”

The sleeper hit you might bypass, however, is the ricotta ($15). “I can get ricotta anywhere,” you might say. “Yawn. Next. Where are more of those mozzarella things?” But this is ricotta made fresh each morning and it never hits the fridge. A lone slab dressed with olive oil is spangled with salt crystals and served on a warm plate that allows the milky whey cheese to be enjoyed at its silkiest. Magic.

The coolest thing I ever saw at Don Peppino’s was Hugo Weaving in a three-piece suit; Fontana’s carpaccio frutti di mare ($27) might be cooler. Bonito, tuna and long-flavored raw prawns are splashed with a tomato and anchovy dressing fermented for a week to get it nice and punchy. It’s a slick dish radiating confidence; pudgy sardine meatballs ($18) seem like the awkward Swedish exchange student at school by comparison.

Slappy tubes of paccheri pasta are partnered with kangaroo tail ragu ($28) braised in red wine and stock with a little cocoa for five hours, and inspired by soul-warming Roman oxtail stew coda alla vaccinara. Wawn, who is a wonderful host, pours a juicy 2019 Carlo Noro Cesanese ($17/$93) to ride alongside it.

Of two substantial mains, oven-roasted lamb ($48) is relegated to the next-time list. I’m too much of a sucker for baccala alla Vicentina ($40), a creamy dried-cod specialty of north-eastern Italy. Johnston’s version is more gentle but still just as rich, featuring lightly brined and salted hapuka poached in milk and bay leaves. Do it.

Does Fontana achieve “favorite restaurant” status? It’s certainly on its way and, when spring kicks into gear, I suspect a table by the window is going to be in even higher demand. Moderate prices, exciting wine and sharply focused food – now that’s what people want to hear.

The low-down

vibrate roman holiday house party

go to dish Sea fruit carpaccio

drinks Boozy classic cocktails and left-field wines from Australia, the old Boot and beyond

Cost About $130 for two, excluding drinks

https://www.clubfontana.com/

Luxury means different things to different people, but in restaurant circles it’s usually high-status items such as caviar, lobster and truffles that earn the tag.

I’m not so sure. Sometimes, it’s about the give of a cushioned banquette, the patina of the table, the weight of a linen napkin on your knee, the tinkle of glass on the martini trolley. The way a considered environment can add to your sense of wellbeing.

At Luke’s Kitchen, a casual name for quite an opulent restaurant that runs alongside the splendid art deco lobby of the Kimpton Margot hotel, the tables for four and six are luxuriously spacious, and the lighting could give a masterclass in setting a mood while still allowing you to read a menu.

Plus, you can order 30 grams of oscietra caviar with sour cream and potato gaufrette for $250. Champagne? Call for the champagne cart. Ditto, the caviar and vodka trolley. If you want to shave truffles all over your food, just add $20 to your bill for every five grams.

Luke Mangan has done it all, from cookbooks to cruise restaurants and airlines, but he’s always created environments in which to have a good time. Now, it’s a grand 1930s hotel restaurant, pitched for business lunches and glitzy dinners, with bottomless brunches on Saturdays.

His talents – and those of head chef and long-time collaborator MJ Olguera, who started with Mangan at Bistro Lulu in Paddington in 2004, seem well-suited to the grand hotel life.

Here, the luxuries are played on shuffle across the broad menu with Mangan’s own modern Australian hits. Skull Island prawns with nam jim and coconut mix it with Peking duck pancakes with hoisin sauce, spiced lamb rump, and Riverina grass-fed rib-eye for two to share.

The garlic bread ($8) is kerfuffle-worthy, being not “garlic bread” but a laminated cronut of caramelized onion jam, curry-spiced garlic butter and Heidi gruyere cheese; sweet, savory, crisp, soft. For a moment, I wonder what it would be like with 20 grams of truffle shaved on top, but the madness quickly passes.

Prawn toast ($18) is difficult to resist, the bread golden and crisp, the sweet prawn mousse jade-green with herbs, a little corn salsa on top for freshness.

It’s Mangan, so there are classics harking back to his days as an eager commis in the kitchen of England’s three Michelin-starred Waterside Inn. Proper food, a bit Frenchy. A pork terrine ($29) is gutsy and satisfying, melting pig’s head, neck and belly into a smooth unit, ready to smash onto grill-marked sourdough.

Olguera teams a lacquered duck for two ($180) with crunchy little salt-and-pepper rice cakes and a coconut curry sauce; a nice move. Roast spatchcock ($41) is jointed and sent out with a citrusy salad of fennel, currants and mandarin on a puddle of fennel puree. I feel I’ve had this before, years ago; yet it’s right for now.

The comfort-food drum beats strongest with slow-cooked beef cheeks in a rich red wine sauce ($46), laced with chickpeas and bolstered by Mangan’s pillowy, creamy pomme puree. A spicy, fleshy 2020 Bondar Junto GSM from McLaren Vale ($83) virtually jumps straight in.

Dessert can go luxe – rum baba – but a pretty little meringue roulade ($21) balanced with rich lemon curd is a hit. More so, for me, than the enduring licorice parfait that has been the chef’s signature since 1995. Nice, but I think we can all move on now.

Overall, it’s the mix of old-school glamor and the free-flowing, no-rules approach to hospitality that makes Luke’s Kitchen of interest; a fresh but familiar face in a part of the city that’s getting more and more attention.

It’s not so much the tableside trolleys and truffles that deliver the luxury, although they do add energy and a bit of fun. It’s more about the craft and the comfort that keeps their little wheels turning; that’s the real luxury here.

The low-down

Luke’s Kitchen

vibrate Grand hotel lobby dining, high on comfort

go to dish Garlic bread with caramelised onions, curry butter, gruyere, $8

drinks Bespoke cocktails from Wilmot Bar, plenty of wines by the glass, and a reassuring wine list strong on classic labels

Terry Durack is chief restaurant critic for The Sydney Morning Herald and senior reviewer for the Good FoodGuide.

https://www.lukemangan.com/

I’ve heard it said by snarky locals and visitors alike: people in Melbourne love to queue up. Shoes, croissants, nightclubs – if there’s a queue, let’s get in it and see what’s at the end when we arrive. I usually have the opposite reaction. If I must stand in line to get something, it’s unlikely I want that thing.

But, occasionally, the reason for the line is valid. Sometimes, the thing at the end of the queue is so good – and so exclusive – that an hour spent standing on the footpath is a small price to pay.

If you’ve taken the tram along Bourke Street after 5pm in the past year, it’s likely you’ve seen just such a queue outside Nana Thai Style Hotpot and BBQ. The crowd is mainly young and mainly Asian, a demographic which might be more food-obsessed than any other in our gloriously diverse and food-infatuated city.

The line begins to form in the late afternoon every day for the 5.30pm opening; its presence alone was enough to pique my interest. What was behind the small storefront that you couldn’t get elsewhere without standing outside in the cold?

The answer is a fantastic hybrid of barbecue and hotpot called mu kratha or mookata that owners Nuttanan Lohayanjaree and Panta Thanapaisan looked for in vain when they moved to Melbourne from Thailand. Nana Thai was originally a pop-up, but Lohayanjaree and Thanapaisan opened the permanent location on Bourke Street in 2020. The queues were almost immediate.

The barbecue comes as a set for two people ($39), and includes a mix of meat and seafood – pork neck, pork belly, squid, prawns, pork liver – that you grill on a gold-domed barbecue heated from beneath with a gas grill. Around the dome is a well that’s filled with bone broth; a pot with extra broth comes on the side. How you proceed from there is entirely up to you. There are no instructions given by the efficient but rushed staff, and there’s really no wrong way to go about it.

Some prefer to grill their meat slowly and carefully, seasoning the grill with the hunk of pork fat provided, adding each element one at a time, allowing it to cook and swiping it through the broth and the provided sweet and spicy barbecue sauce, before moving on to the next protein.

Others cram as much stuff onto the grill as possible, moving it into the soup as it’s done, adding mushrooms and noodles and cabbage from a second platter to create a barbecue-hotpot amalgam, then scooping it into soup bowls before eating it. There’s a raw egg to add to the mix, and a spicy and tangy sauce to add to your soup bowl that’s shot through with onions.

Nana Thai also offers a straightforward hotpot for two ($39) that comes without the barbecue element. If you’re in the mood for soup and soup alone – and if you crave intestine and marinated chicken, which the barbecue doesn’t have, but the hotpot does – this is a lovely option. But there’s all manner of hotpot in Melbourne, and I probably wouldn’t wait in line just for the version at Nana’s. For a big group with people who are happy sharing, it’s a nice thing to add to the mix, though.

Nana’s also has a huge menu of Northern Thai dishes, most of them larbs, salads and soups of various sorts. If you don’t want the barbecue or hotpot and you don’t want to wait in line, these other dishes are available to pre-order and take away, as well as via various delivery apps.

They are mostly intensely spicy – ​​prepared, as the menu warns, to Thai-taste heat levels. And they’re fantastic: raw blue crab and green papaya salad with fermented fish ($20) comes swimming in lime, fish sauce, chillies and funk.

The Mama tom yum soup ($20) is not the often-miserly offering found at your neighborhood Thai joint: broth with a few carrots and celery. Here, it combines instant noodles, deep-fried pork belly, prawns, calamari, pork balls and egg in a bright and fragrant bowlful.

The line might seem like a lot to deal with – even on a recent freezing Tuesday night at 6pm, the wait was over an hour – but the staff do everything they can to streamline the process. Menus are handed out and orders taken while you’re standing on the street; by the time you make it to your stools and no-frills table, your food will already be waiting for you, the grill hot, the broth bubbling.

Stumbling out an hour later, full and happy, someone passed me to the crowd and asked, “Is it worth the wait?” Without hesitation, I replied, “Absolutely.”

Vibes: Bright, colourful, crowded, utilitarian

Go to dish: BBQ set for two ($39)

Drinks: Soda, milk tea, a handful of basic beers

Cost: $39 for two, excluding drinks

https://www.nanathaistylehotpotandbbq.com/

Quick, pinch my napkin. Is this real? Have we made it? Am I actually here? After months of trying to land a booking at one of Sydney’s most popular omakase restaurants, it is finally time to experience a level of seafood that can cause fellow food critics to cry in fatty tuna rapture: “Blessed are we for this sliver of moderately dry -aged fish!”

Kuon Omakase opened two years ago in Haymarket’s neon-tinged Darling Square which, depending on who you talk to, is either a soul-sucking boil on the rear end of Chinatown or a family-friendly precinct for bubble tea and Pancakes on the Rocks.

To plonk your own rear end on one of Kuon’s nine seats you need to be hovering over its website at midday on the first (but sometimes fourth) Tuesday of each month when reservations open a few weeks in advance. Refresh, refresh, refresh. Click, click, click. Refresh. Click. Refresh. Click. Throw laptop at wall.

Infuriating booking systems are a hallmark of Japanese omakase restaurants, which have been popping up like mushrooms after a downpour over the past two years. The set-menu format – usually about 20 small fishy things for north of $150 – is a smart way to lock in customer spend and staffing requirements. It’s also a fun and mindful way to eat.

After more than a year of failed attempts, I managed to secure a Tuesday night spot at Kuon’s elegant, blond-wood counter. It’s a calming, sparsely decorated room that says, “You’re here to pay attention to the chef hand-molding each piece of sushi.” One very attentive waiter clears plates, pours wine and shows guests to the loo across the laneway.

Before nine mouthfuls of nigiri (raw fish served on vinegared rice), there’s a procession of free-form creations that showcase head chef Jun Miyauchi’s skill at assembling pretty things on nice plates. Seared scampi is a highlight; sweet and delicate and served with perilla leaf and a hunk of avocado, it requires a Certificate IV in Chopsticks to pick up on your first go.

Steamed chawanmushi custard is a warming lucky dip of dried scallop, turnip-like lily root, edamame and corn; ponzu butter adds luster to a jumbo Pacific oyster served in a shell that looks like a souvenir ashtray; wagyu tenderloin with fatty monkfish liver – the foie gras of the sea – is enhanced by a lick of red vinegar-based sauce. Is it delicious? Oh yeah.

I’m taken less with the optional $25 course of tempura sea-urchin gonads. While I’ve had the occasional spiritual moment with sea urchin when it’s served fresh from deep waters, much of the stuff served in restaurants seems to be chefs having a laugh: “Hey, let’s see how much we can charge for this kraken snot that tastes like a fishmonger’s armpit.”

Then it happens. Thealpha. Theomega. The emperor nigiri. Crowned with a daub of salted kelp, it’s a moment of balance and harmony and pure essence of the ocean, the buttery New Zealand fish firm and sweet against each al dente grain of rice. The heavens open and Gabriel’s trumpet blasts. Lo and behold, this perfect piece of sushi.

If you’re into this sort of thing, these 10 seconds of bliss really help to justify the $230 price tag.

Unfortunately, the imperador was absent from the menu a week later when I sent a photographer as Kuon only uses the best seasonal catch of the day, et cetera, et cetera. Bermagui-caught bluefin tuna is a little more consistent though, and almost as wonderful.

Miyauchi serves three cuts of the noble fish on my visit: marinated ruby-red akami (lean meat from the tuna’s back); luscious, highly marbled otoro (from the fattiest part of the belly) and chutoro, a pale-pink, medium-fatty cut with a flavor that pings every pleasure receptor.

There’s also pearly-white southern calamari dotted with caviar, meaty scallops that melt on the tongue, and the sweetest of prawns from New Caledonia.

Many of the jewel-box morsels are seasoned with Nikiri, a secret soy blend brushed just before serving.

Qualms, I have a few. The only white wine by the glass is a dry and textural 2019 Grace Koshu Toriibira from Japan and it’s $27. Sake is better value, but still far from a bargain.

But, well on my way to becoming one of Sydney’s many omakase fanatics chasing seasonal fish and signature specials, I will absolutely return.

How does Kuon stand up to Yoshii’s Omakase at Crown which is – wait for it – $350 per person? I’ll have to let you know when I’ve landed a bloody booking.

Vibes: Revered sushi temple for delicious moments of zen

Go to dish: Bluefin tuna otoro (as part of a set menu)

Drinks: Short and pricey list of mostly French whites, one red and lots of sake

Cost: $230 per person for a 20-course omakase menu

Kuon Omakase in Sydney